Disgraced Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned on Tuesday due to her numerous plagiarism allegations, will likely keep her $900,000 annual salary as she returns to a faculty position at the university.
Prior to serving as president, Gay earned a salary of $879,079 as a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean in 2021, as well as a salary of $824,068 in 2020, according to school newspaper The Harvard Crimson. Following her resignation, she will be transitioning to a teaching role in Harvard’s Department of Political Science.
It has not yet been disclosed what her new salary will be, but it is expected to be comparable to her compensation before serving as president, if not higher.
Previous president Lawrence Bacow was earning $1.3 million a year before his departure, according to the Crimson.
According to The Free Beacon, eight out of Gay’s 17 published works have been implicated in her plagiarism allegations, which now number almost 50 in total.
Gay’s presidency was the shortest in Harvard’s history. The search committee that discovered Gay and recruited her for the role was led by Penny Pritzker, who served as Secretary of Commerce under President Barack Obama. Pritzker is also a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, which made the decision to keep Gay during the first round of controversy surrounding her policies on antisemitic speech on campus (it was not this but the avalanche of plagiarism accusations that led to Gay’s resignation). Obama’s private advising reportedly played a role in the Corporation’s initial resistance to firing her.
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In her resignation letter, Gay acknowledged that she had brought a lot of negative attention to the school in recent months, but she also claimed that she had been “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” and did not apologize for her comments in Congress.
She is being temporarily replaced by University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 as the Harvard Corporation searches for a permanent replacement. Garber, a staunch proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming, said “diversity has enriched every facet” of the school. He was seated behind Gay during her Congressional testimony.
The accusations of plagiarism began when reporters and researchers, including Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, took a deeper look into Gay’s resume following her disastrous Congressional testimony on Dec. 5th, during which she and other university presidents clumsily admitted that calling for the genocide of Jews in the context of the Israel-Hamas War was permitted under their current hate speech policies. Gay also faced criticism for what many saw as Harvard’s lackluster response to the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who grilled Gay and presidents from the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Congress, admonished Harvard for allowing her to retain a faculty position. “She’s not fit to be a faculty member,” Stefanik told The New York Post. “It’s unacceptable when you have students at Harvard who would be expelled for plagiarism to allow a faculty member who has nearly 50 examples of plagiarism in their very slim body of academic work. It’s absurd and everybody knows it. Harvard knows it too.”
CEO of Pershing Square hedge fund and Harvard donor Bill Ackman, who played a significant role in pressuring the university about antisemitism, questioned the decision to keep her as well.
This makes no sense. How can she continue as a member of the faculty? https://t.co/LdBkqsNyvl
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
Ackman is also calling for a shake-up to the school’s board. “Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” he said.
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